The list of Eastlit Writers October 2015 is alphabetical by first name:
Ana Prundaru
Ana Prundaru lives a stone’s throw away from the birthplace of milk chocolate. Her work has been included in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wilderness House, Vagabond Journey, Kyoto Journal, Litro and elsewhere. Find her at http://www.anaprundaru.com/
Anna Yin
Anna Yin was born in China and immigrated to Canada in 1999. She has five poetry books including “Wings Toward Sunlight”, “Inhaling the Silence” and “Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac”. She won the 2005 Ted Plantos Memorial Award, the 2010/2014 MARTY Awards and the 2013 Professional Achievement Award from CPAC etc. Her poems in English & Chinese and ten translations by her were in a Canadian Studies textbook used by Humber College. Anna was a finalist for Canada’s Top 25 Canadian Immigrants Award in 2011 and in 2012 with poems on Arc Poetry, New York Times, China Daily, CBC Radio and Poetry in Transit etc. Anna is currently Ontario representative for the League of Canadian Poets and Mississauga’s Inaugural Poet Laureate. Her website: annapoetry.com
Arshiya Kausar
Arshiya Kausar is an O Levels English Literature and English Language teacher at Beaconhouse, with a passion for reading, creative writing and imparting literary knowledge to young minds. Her work has been published on the Express Tribune Blog and The Nation Blog.
Eiman Ilyas
Eiman Ilyas was born in Omsan, spent his childhood in Ireland, and then returned to Pakistan, where he is originally from. He developed his love for writing, here, in Pakistan, where he became more and more conscious of his surroundings and his feelings. Right now he is 15 years old and will be starting 11th class in September. Alongside studying for his O levels exams, he continue to write as a pastime.
Khor Hui Min
Khor Hui Min works as a book editor in educational publishing. She believes in a healthy, balanced lifestyle and loves yoga and fitness in general. In her free time, she likes to write, bake, cook and volunteer with NGOs, especially those that champion environmental causes such as the Malaysian Nature Society.
Kurt Cline
Kurt Cline is Associate Professor of English and World Comparative Literature, National Taipei University of Technology. Poems and stories have appeared, most recently, in BlazeVOX, Danse Macabre, Shotglass Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, HuesoLoco, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Black Scat, and Clockwise Cat. Scholarly articles have appeared in Anthropology of Consciousness;Concentric, Beatdom Literary Journal; and Comparative Civilizations and Cultures: Journal of the Jean Gebser Society.
Being an American, my flight has been toward the west, but towards what we generally call the East. More and more, people are scattered across the surface of the earth. Although cultures are different, there are things that unite all citizens of the world, and I should like to touch upon of few of these. Taiwan has but a small voice in the circle of nations, so I hope these poems might make Taiwan more prominent in arts and literature.
Lawrence F. Farrar
Lawrence F. Farrar is a former diplomat with long experience in Japan (including student days and military service for a total of 17 years. He also served in Germany, Norway, and Washington, DC. Short term assignments took him to nearly 40 countries, from Iran to Tanzania, and Venezuela to China.Since leaving government service he has published 35 or so stories in literary magazines. In addition to Eastlit, these have included: Curbside Splendor E-Zine, Tampa Review Online, Jelly Bucket, O-Dark-Thirty, Colere, The Write Room, Cigale, The MacGuffin, Streetlight, and Cheat River Review.
Nabeela Maswood
Nabeela Maswood is a Bangladeshi, English Literature Major with an undying love for writing, mostly about displacements of all forms. She had done her undergraduate work in Bangladesh, at the Independent University, Bangladesh before recently immigrating to Canada. She, with her cat Lola is trying to sort out her life, a cup of tea at a time.
Nguyen Dinh Chinh and David Cunningham
Nguyen Dinh Chinh is a Vietnamese author, poet, playwright, journalist, sculptor, painter and philosopher. David Cunningham is a teacher and writer from Ireland who has spent many years in Vietnam and has become very close to the author and his family in that time.
The text of Dem Thanh Nhan was originally translated by a collection of Vietnamese translators during the 2000’s and then edited from 2012-2015. The novel is unlike most others from Vietnam as it explores many previously ignored corners of the country and provides fascinating insights into how people lived and acted in Vietnam in the early 1990s.
Nicole Seah
Nicole Seah, born in 1998, is a student currently residing in Singapore. She has also lived in China. Her work is featured or will be forthcoming in JUNOESQ Literary Journal, AWARE Singapore, Things Magazine in Boston and Wallflowers Magazine in Singapore. She attended the Creative Arts Program (CAP) in 2012, and has contributed work and three years of commitment to her school’s creative writing magazine, Element. She has a passion for writing, poetry in particular and loves living in Asia, a continent full of interesting culture and history.
Nirjhar Dutta
His name is Nirjhar Dutta. He did his post-graduation in Computer Applications from Pondicherry University. He loves to travel, read books, listen folk songs, chat. He is an avid follower of eastern and western classical music. He is foodie and he boasts about it. His favourite writers are Tagore, Pamuk, Oscar Wilde and Kafka.
Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf
Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf is an academic at the English Language and Literature Dept.,International Islamic University Malaysia. She’s a bilingual poet and short story writer, published both in Malaysia and abroad. Some of her Malay short stories had won national writing prizes in Malaysia. A few others (both in English and Malay) were made school/university texts. Her first book of poetry The Art of Naming: A Muslim Woman’s Journey was published in 2006.
Peter Mallett
Peter Mallett, long-term resident of Kobe, Japan, is a university professor and freelance writer with an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. The former Arts editor ofKansai Time Out and publisher/editor of Artspace, he has written for The Asahi Evening News, Gramophone Japan, Opera News, The New Internationalist etc. His textbook From Word to Letter was published in 2007. He has twice been featured at the Osaka literary evening Four Stories reading from his novel Appassionata and is currently working on a historical novel.
Preeyakit Buranasin
Writer on weekdays and English teacher on weekends, Preeyakit has a bachelor’s in English and a master’s in English Literature. During his studies, he started writing both in prose and poetry, resulting in works in various genres. He’s an Ananchanok Poetry Award recipient. In addition, he’s a member of Bangkok Community Theatre.
Priya Prithviraj
Priya Prithviraj writes poems which appear in international journals such as the New Plains Review, The Tower Journal, The Linnet’s Wings Summer Poetry Collection and Kritya Poetry Journal. Her poem ‘Forgotten’ has also been featured at the BIG LIT Weekend at The Stewartry Book Festival at The Bakehouse in Gateway of Fleet, Scotland. A major in English Literature at The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, she’s a curriculum developer. She blogs at https://priyaprithviraj.
Reid Mitchell
Reid Mitchell grew up in New Orleans and currently lives in the People’s Republic of China, where he has taught at several universities. Bests EastLit, his poems have been published in Cha, Asia Literary Review, Softblow, and elsewhere. His personality seems to have been influenced by watching too many Foghorn Leghorn cartoons.
Saadia Shabbir
Saadia Shabbir was born in Pakistan in the last and smallest room of her grandparents’ house. She moved to NYC around age 9. Writing and reading have always been two of her favorite hobbies. Although English is not her first language, it is the language she knows best. It has taken her a long time to love and appreciate her cultural heritage. She has a BA in English literature and is currently a full time mother for her 3 month old daughter.
Sharmilla Ganesan
Sharmilla Ganesan is a Malaysian writer who does feature stories and reviews for The Star newspaper, primarily on books, arts and film. She also writes a literary column called “Booked Out”, which aims to create accessible conversations about books and reading. She is currently a Fulbright/Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow with the University of Maryland in the United States. Sharmilla’s short stories can be found in “KL Noir: Yellow” and “Cyberpunk: Malaysia” (both published by Fixi Novo).
Shivaji Das
Writer, traveller, and photographer; Shivaji Das is the author of ‘Journeys with the caterpillar: Travelling through the islands of Flores and Sumba, Indonesia’ and ‘Sacred Love: Erotic art in the temples of Nepal’
Shivaji Das was born and brought up in the north-eastern province of Assam in India. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, subsequent to which he completed his post-graduation from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta. He is presently working as a management consultant in Singapore.
Shivaji’s writings have been published in magazines such as TIME, Asian Geographic, Venture Mag, Jakarta Post, Conscious Magazine, PanaJournal, Freethinker, etc.
He has given talks on topics ranging from Travel Writing, Humour in Cross-Cultural context, and the culture of Indonesia in universities and forums in Singapore, Morocco, China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil. His interviews have been featured on BBC, CNBC, Channel News Asia, Travel Radio Australia, Around the World TV, Radio Roaming, and Singapore Discovery Centre’s IFD exhibition.
His photographs in collaboration with his wife, Yolanda Yu, have been exhibited in the Darkroom Gallery, Vermont (USA), Kuala Lumpur International Photography Festival (Malaysia), the Arts House (Singapore), and the National Library (Singapore).
Shivaji also takes an active interest in migrant issues and is associated with Singapore based organization Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2). He is the conceptualizer and one of the key organizers for the Migrant Worker Poetry Contests in Singapore and Malaysia.
Sze-Leng Tan
Sze-Leng Tan is an academic and writer of poems and short stories. Her poems were published in The Malaysian Poetic Chronicles.
William Marr
William Marr has published 23 volumes of poetry (three in English and the rest in his native Chinese language), 3 books of essays and several books of translations. His most recent book is Chicago Serenade, a trilingual (Chinese/English/French) anthology of poems published in Paris in 2015. His poetry has been translated into more than ten languages and included in over one hundred anthologies. Some of his poems are used in high school and college textbooks in Taiwan, China, England, and Germany. He is a former president of the Illinois State Poetry Society and has received numerous awards, including three from Taiwan for his poetry and translations. A PhD recipient and a retired research scientist, he now resides in a Chicago suburb.
Xenia Taiga
Xenia Taiga lives in southern China with a cockatiel and an Englishman. http://xeniataiga.com/
